In Britain it is National Slacker Day: Stand Up for your Right to Sit Back Down!

565AD - St Columba reported seeing a sea monster in Loch Ness.

1485-"A Horse! A Horse! My Kingdom for a Horse!!" Battle of Bosworth Field. Welsh prince Henry Tudor defeats and kills King Richard III and becomes King Henry VII, first of the Tudor Dynasty. Shakespeare made Richard out to be a hunchback usurper and child murderer, but couldn’t hide the fact that he died well. Whatever the truth he went down sword in hand, fighting like a true descendant of Richard Lionheart.

1558- When Antonio Carafa became Pope Paul IV he blamed the loss of half of Europe to Protestantism to the corruption of the Catholic Church. He attacked the dry rot with zeal. He started with a warning to all monks away from their monasteries without permission to return at once. This day he ordered the gates of Rome closed. All deadbeat monks still remaining be rounded up and sentenced to be galley slaves. He’s the Pope who ordered pants painted on Michelangelo’s nude of Christ in the Last Judgement.

1572-Admiral Gaspar Coligny, was leader of the French Huguenots –Protestants and was one of the most powerful men in France. This night he was recovering from an earlier assassination attempt, when agents of the Duke du Guise rushed into his room and stabbed him repeatedly. They hurled his body out a window to smash on the pavement stones at the Dukes feet. When it was pointed out to the king that the French Protestants may not like this, the emotionally unstable King Charles IX shouted:" Then slay them all, so none shall remain to accuse me !" The Great Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre was the result.

1611- Galileo made a group of Venetian senators and noblemen climb to the top of Saint Marks Basilica in Venice to demonstrate to them new invention, the telescope.

1715 – Handel’s "Watermusic" premiered on the Thames River to mark celebrations of the Peace ending the War of Spanish Succession.

1776- The Long Island Campaign began. British General Lord Howe and his brother Admiral Richard, called “Black Dick” , commanded the largest invasion force ever sent by England. Today they began ferrying their army from loyalist Staten Island across the Straights of Verrazano for the march on the village of Breuklyn.-Brooklyn. Their Hessian mercenaries, to show off their discipline, stood at rigid attention as the flatboats bobbed in the choppy water. Now that the British fleet were anchored in New York Harbor, Gen. George Washington agreed with other military strategists that New York City was as good as lost. He contemplated burning the town to keep it from being used by the British as a base. But Congress couldn't let him give up America’s largest port without a fight.

1791-THE NIGHT OF FIRE- Haitian slaves, after decades of oppression were organized by a voodoo priest named Boumann. This night they set fire to plantations, crops and and massacred 300 white settlers. This began the great Haitian Revolution which will rage until 1811 and make Haiti the second republic in the New World.

1806- elderly French painter Jean Fragonard died of a cerebral seizure after eating a large fruit ice on a hot day.

1849-The first aerial bomb attack. Austrian General Von Wintzingerode was at a loss at how to get at the besieged Italian city of Venice. The Venetian lagoon was too deep to wade across but was too shallow for battleships. Finally a Swiss mercenary suggested filling hot air balloons with troops and flying them over the city to drop explosives. Those little round black bombs with lit fuses you see in cartoons. A dozen balloons filled with grenadiers were launched aloft, but before they could do anything a stiff breeze blew them all to Yugoslavia. Doh! The real first aerial bombing would be in 1912.

1851- The schooner America defeated the British yacht Aurora to win the trophy called the Hundred Guinea Cup that would in time be called the America's Cup. It was the first win for the US in an international sports competition. American yachts continued to win it for the next 150 years until Australia II took it in 1984.

1860- Italian nationalist leader Giusseppi Garabaldi with his 'redshirts' crossed the Straights of Messina from Sicily and invaded the boot of Italy.

1882- American showman P.T. Barnum bought the largest elephant in the London Zoo. He created a new name for the beast- he called it a JUMBO. It was the highlight of his circus for years After Jumbo was hit by a freight train and killed, PT Barnum had it’s bones bleached and charged people admission to come look at it’s skeleton.

1901-The Cadillac Automobile Company formed. Named for the French explorer who founded Detroit, William De La Mothe-Cadillac.

1902- Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to ride in an automobile.

1906 - 1st Victor Victrola manufactured, using Emile Berliners flat record turntable system. The Victrola was so cheap and easy to use it became standard in many homes and finished off any competition from Thomas Edison’s rival talking cylinder system.

1910- Despite a pledge after the Russo-Japanese War that they would bestow “complete freedom” on the Korean people this day Japan’s military occupied Korea and annexed it to the Japanese Empire.

1914- The Battle of Mons. British forces stop the German advance towards Paris and in so doing allow the main French army to win at the Marne. In a proclamation to his generals Kaiser Wilhelm stated “Roll over this contemptible little British Army!” The term appealed to the Tommies, and they nicknamed themselves “The Old Contemptibles”

Also the German field general was General Von Kluck, who’s name rhymed with the Britain's favorite expletive. As the marched through Belgian streets they sang “We don’t give a F*CK about old Von Kluck an iz all F*CKING ARMY!”

1922- After World War One, Lawrence of Arabia wrote home from Baghdad about the Postwar British occupation of Iraq:” The Public had been led into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad comunique’s have been belated, insincere and incomplete. Things have been far worse here than we have been told.”

1927- 200,000 people protest in Hyde Park London and around the world for clemency for convicted Italian immigrants Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vancetti. They were socialists who were convicted of murdering a store clerk in Massachusetts and became a radical cause-celebre. Letters demanding mercy came in from George Bernard Shaw, Helen Keller, Picasso, the Pope and more. Woody Guthrie wrote folk songs in praise of Sacco & Vancetti. The next day the State of Massachusetts electrocuted them anyway.

1935- Father Charles Coughlin, “the Radio Priest” addressed ten thousand in Madison Square Gardens. At the height of his popularity almost one third the American public tuned into his weekly radio address. But as his influence waned after the 1936 presidential elections. He turned increasingly to racist hate mongering and eventually faded away.

1939- The first aerosol spray can.

1942- Tex Avery's first cartoon for MGM, Blitz Wolf.

1942- Brazil declared war on the Axis powers. She was the only Latin American country to send troops to Europe to fight in World War Two.

1945- This was the date Stalin scheduled for the Soviet invasion of Hokaido, in North Japan. The American invasion, in the event the atomic bombs didn't work, was not scheduled until November 1st. With all of the remaining Japanese army on the southern beaches awaiting the American attack, if the Soviet invasion had come off as scheduled they would have been able to overrun Northern Japan quite easily. The U.S. would have to settle for a divided Japan resembling Korea. History however, turned out differently.

1953-The French government closed the Devil's Island prison colony.

1976- The protest at the Seabrook Nuclear Plant in New Hampshire. The birth of the U.S. anti-nuclear movement.

1984 – The Last Volkswagen Rabbit produced.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: When we say something is really big, we call it Jumbo. Who first coined that term?